Pebble Watch Revival Confirmed By Founder

Eric Migicovsky, founder of the company that leveraged Kickstarter to produce and distribute what became the Pebble smartwatch in 2012, and subsequently turned Kickstarter into a viable platform for crowdfunding major projects at scale has announced that he will form a new company to revive and reintroduce the long-dead smartwatch, which introduced the category to begin with, in the near future.

In a blog post published today to coincide with the official open sourcing of the PebbleOS by Google, Migicovsky went into detail on why he decided to revive the Pebble watch and expressed gratitude towards those who still continued to use their watches long after Google discontinued official support for them in 2016.

The discontinuation was due to two major factors despite the short existence of Pebble as a company. First the company was acquired by Fitbit in the midst of its own explosive growth and mania over the fitness tracker in, with the intent to integrate Pebble’s OS into its own products, before Google themselves circled Fitbit for their own acquisition to build the foundation for Google Health in Android, and down the line, Google WearOS.

As a result of being acquired twice in such a short amount of time, that left Pebble in a sort of limbo where no new products were being designed and developed, and both hardware and software support were slowly decaying, to the point where the most dedicated owners were developing alternatives for watch bands and developing workarounds to maintain existing devices.

When Google officially discontinued support for the Pebble with no future replacement in 2016, it galvanized the community of passionate owners to work together to appreciate what they had and what no smartwatch since has been able to surpass: a solid, customizable smartwatch with long battery life with a display visible in direct sunlight that could be heavily customized to the owner’s preference.

It’s rather surprising that nearly a decade since the Pebble was discontinued, no other smartwatch has come close to its simplicity and ease of use, with Migicovsky going as far as stating the same. With the open-sourcing of PebbleOS, the possibilities for hardware development don’t just stop at watches anymore.

To that end, Migicovsky is actively encouraging fans and interested parties to play with the newly open-sourced operating system to extend it and add new features and functionality, on top of the ongoing development of the famous watch faces the community and watch became known for.

More details on the revival can be found on the newly launched RePebble campaign site, where interested parties can register for more information and news on when pre-orders go live.